NFX Guild just showed 14 new companies to top investors in its latest demo day

Yesterday, three-year-old, NFX Guild, a Silicon Valley-based, invite-only accelerator program that has now worked with 80 companies, hosted its newest demo day before 200 venture investors at the Computer History Museum in unfailingly sunny Mountain View, Ca.

The outfit — which is backed financially by the venture firms CRV, Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Mayfield, and that works only with startups that've been referred to it through a network of scouts — dialed back on the number of presenting companies. (Its previous three batches featured 16, then 13, then 21, companies, respectively. Yesterday, it featured 14.)

A more concentrated effort seemed to pay off, with a number of intriguing teams pitching their work, from a company promising to wring more revenue out of attorneys' mobile phone use, to a new open source platform for data scientists, to a startup trying to modernize moving companies.

Altogether, says serial entrepreneur and firm cofounder Jim Currier, 70 percent of the companies to pass through NFX Guild have gone on to raise subsequent funding.

For those of you who didn’t make it to the event but want to know some of the ideas and teams that NFX Guild thought would interest their fellow VCs, here's who presented what, starting with a company called Zero.

Tagline: Edge computing and device-centric AI for the professional services industry.

Description: Zero is an email solution with a device-centric AI that's designed to power revenue growth for professional services firms, starting with legal practices. In plainer English, the company says it can both organize lawyers' emails, as well as track the time they spend on their phones, then send that information directly into the document management systems used by their firms, as well as to their billing systems. "Suddenly, email becomes a new revenue source," says CEO Alex Babin. Zero, which is charging $250 per user per month, has its sights set on the country's 50,00 law firms for now, but adding accounting and consulting into the mix, it sees a $1.6 trillion market opportunity. (Yes, it said trillion.)

Location: Palo Alto

Competitors: N/A

Employees: 14

Capital Raised: $1.5 million

Metrics: The team says the company is currently in pilots with multiple law firms.

Description: The company argues that the fast-growing data scientist community is highly underserved. Yesterday, talking to the crowd, CEO Isaac Faber noted that if a data scientist tries to put a file that’s bigger than 25 megabytes on Github, she's told she can't do it. Meanwhile, to obtain an analytics tool, a data scientist first has to suffer through ten screens on Amazon Web Services. Faber says Matrix has built a platform to address these shortcomings. More precisely, it's built a cloud-based workflow and storage software that aims to create a network effect among data scientists and others who use it. It's free to use but Matrix thinks its data scientist users will be willing to pony up for two things: storage and "compute," meaning a service on which to run their algorithms. Their other options, Faber noted, are competitors that are charging pricey per-seat licenses, and he said that such fees won't fly for "nine out of 10 data scientists."

Description: Crater is selling software to moving companies that aims to modernize the way they interact with consumers. Rather than see them continue to use pen and paper and fax machines, rather than watch them send individuals into homes to come up with cost estimates, Crater says its software can tell a moving company how much a consumer is moving so it can come up with an estimate at its convenience. It also insists that it can predict weight and volume with 92 percent accuracy.

Metrics: The company says it already is already working with 135 moving companies and has generated more than 35,000 estimates for them. It also says it's adding 10 new moving company customers per month with just one salesperson (though it obviously hopes to hire more).

Team: CEO Alex Alpert (pictured above) was previously the COO of Moveline, a company that invites people to take a video of their stuff, then receive quotes from moving companies.

Tagline: A B2B marketplace that connects enterprises with high-end consultants.

Description: Dūcō is an on-demand platform where businesses connect with world-class experts, starting with geopolitical and international business intelligence. Dūcō says it can make it easier, faster, and more cost effective for decision-makers to connect with expert consultants, gather information, and solve real-world business objectives. If it's right, it's certainly in the right market. Consulting is a $500 billion industry.

Description: Mammoth Diagnostics is trying to create a new class of rapid, low cost, and easy-to-use diagnostics for industries ranging from oil and gas to agriculture to healthcare. Why: According to its newly minted PhD founders, the diagnostics industry hasn’t changed since the 1980s, yet just as CRISPR is revolutionizing the therapeutics industry, it’s also about to revolutionize the diagnostics industry. How its product works: customers embed the company’s CRISPR technology into a piece of bar-coded strip of paper, apply a liquid sample to the paper, and within an hour, a color change will indicate a result. Photographing that paper afterward ostensibly shows the outcome of that result -- data that then "gets uploaded to the cloud." In short, a wide of variety of industries could avoid the painful process of mailing in samples and waiting on answers. The company insists it can create diagnostic tests far faster than was previously possible, too.

Tagline: The new way for Fortune 1000 companies to pay outside vendors

Description: Talygon want to make it easy for Fortune 1000 companies to make small payments to vendors, like a kind of Venmo for businesses. Toward that end, users exchange invoices and payments in chats with business partners and the company processes the payments as a master vendor. The idea is for large corporates to easily reduce the vendors on their books; the company sees the addressable market as “literally in the trillions of dollars.” (Worth mentioning: it takes 3 percent of each payment.)

Location: San Francisco

Competitors: Ariba, Coupa, Bill.com, Fieldglass

Employees: 8

Capital Raised: $705,000 convertible note

Metrics: The company says revenue is growing at 40 percent per quarter and that it’s processing tens of millions in payments annually for Fortune 100 companies, including Pfizer, Corning, and Medtronic.

Description: FilmHub is a technology platform that makes it simple for streaming services to find, license, track and pay for film and television content. It also vows to makes it simpler for content owners to get distribution and payment from streaming services. It handles all the fees and keeps 20 percent of revenue earned. Why does the world need the service? FilmHub told the audience that just 5 percent of all movies are currently available on streaming services, because it's an "antiquated, relationship-based" business filled with distributors, lawyers and aggregators gumming up the works for creators, said CEO Klaus Badelt. FilmHub plans to work on getting the 10 million films people can't stream currently into circulation.

Location: Los Angeles

Competitors: Agents, lawyers

Employees: 6

Capital Raised: $1 million

Metrics: The company says 50 streaming customers have already signed up for the service, including Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. It also says it has 12,000 film titles on its platform.

Tagline: P2P marketplace for international shopping and delivery powered by travelers

Description: Grabr is a trusted peer-to-peer community marketplace connecting shoppers and travelers all around the world. With Grabr, shoppers gain access to the products they can’t get otherwise, with a little help from travelers heading their way. The company’s vision is to break down borders so that everyone can enjoy their favorite products, no matter what city they call home — while enabling travelers to monetize extra space in their suitcases.

Location: San Francisco (headquarters)

Competitors: Airfrov, Backpack, Entrusters, PiggyBee

Employees: 28

Capital Raised: The company has so far raised $6.2 million across three rounds from nine investors, including a $2.7 million seed round that closed in July.

Description: The Edgybees platform aims to brings AR experiences to anything that moves, even at the highest speeds, from drones to cars, trains, wearable devices and beyond. The initial idea is to sell to fire departments, police departments and Homeland Security officers. In a presentation before the crowd, CEO Adam Kaplan showed off software that allows drone pilots to view maps, distress signals, as well as GPS locations that are overlaid atop other footage in order to help victims. (Otherwise, the drones are flying blind, in a manner of speaking.) Though the company sees a $5 billion market in public safety, the idea, eventually, is to expand into consumer, industrial, and real estate markets, too.

Location: Palo Alto and Israel

Competitors: N/A

Employees: 10

Capital Raised: The company say it's right now closing its first round with $4.5 million.

Metrics: The entire team is made up of software engineers; they collectively have 15 patents pending on this idea.

Team: CTO/Co-Founder Menashe Haskin comes from from Amazon, where he says he led early development of Alexa, FireTV and Prime Air Drone. Pictured above, CEO Adam Kaplan.

Tagline: The #1 U.S. marketplace for the $50 billion packaged tours industry.

Description: Stride is a metasearch marketplace for expert-planned trip packages, from guided tours to independent adventures to river cruises. The company says the market is $50 billion per year for English speakers, noting that it's largely untouched by the large U.S. travel marketplaces that continue to focus on selling simpler travel components like flight and hotel rooms. Stride has already facilitated 20,000 unique trips operated by more than 600 travel companies and generated over 60,000 traveler reviews.

Description: The team is building what it’s calling a targeted outdoor ad platform — an “AdWords for the offline world.” How? By slapping internet connected screens atop ride-share vehicles. (Ozzy also presented at the recent demo day of another venture firm, Pear.)

Tagline: Sales and compliance software for the 10,000 banks in the U.S.

Description: This company makes online lending software to help banks increase their sales and ensure compliance and says it can win over customers in large part because the vendors they work with right now haven't made a lot of effort to update even simple things like their user interface. The comparison sounded a bit ambitious to this reporter, but the company repeatedly likened itself to a kind of Veeva Systems, which similarly tried (and succeeded) in shaking up the pharmaceutical industry.

Tagline: A blockchain-based marketplace for digital property starting with photos

Description: Photographers can now direct-license their photos to customers, without the middleman, saving up to 75 percent in fees compared with existing stock photography agencies. In fact, photo licensing is already a $4 billion market. That makes it a perfect application for blockchain technology, which is taking down incumbents that charge usurious fees, though the company already has its eye on other types of digital property that can also be marked, archived and licensed on the platform.